Today I’d like to get y’all’s feedback on an issue I’m currently facing in development. My roleplay games usually have pretty big maps; on the order of around 100,000 parts, give or take a few thousand. This is alright for desktop/laptop users since Roblox performance is much better than it used to be. However tablet/phone users have some pretty big issues, and even the lower-end laptops/desktops have a few problems running a game of this kinda scale.
That’s where Streaming Enabled comes in. It does boost performance considerably for everyone, but it also comes with its own problems. The biggest of these is that the laptop/desktop users don’t get the full experience of being able to see the landscape. They only see a few hundred or thousand studs around them.
So that’s where my problem is. Do I use Streaming and just accept people won’t be able to see very far? Do I forget about it and just let my mobile users struggle? Is there another option here I’m missing, such as a scripted one?
I want the best possible experience for all users. If Streaming could be enabled in-game this would all be solved, but Roblox has some reason for making it not scriptable it seems. What would y’all do here? I appreciate any and all responses.
I would go with StreamingEnabled, performance is key. Sure it may take away from the great scenes inside your game but at the end of the day people would rather be able to play the game than lag.
Streaming enabled helps with loading times and mobile players. Personally I’d say turn it on because I don’t like having to wait 30 minutes every time I join atf.
Also it’s rather hard to script and make a system like the one roblox has without some major flaws.
You can increase the target radius so that the streaming system loads in as much as possible, but keep the min radius fairly low so that if the device needs it, the system can happily load stuff back out again.
If you want performance for all the devices good and want to immersive the PC players, what most games do is add a bit of fog. The fog end will have to be somewhat the same colour as the outdoor ambience and is slightly smaller than the simulation radius. Make sure the fog start is somewhat 1 half to one third of the simulation radius.
I didn’t even realize streaming had that feature. That’s fantastic! When was that added?
Also how would this work with someone who has their graphics manually set to 10? Would streaming just reduce the range and make the nearby parts look good?
I’m not 100% certain on the logic. I’ve always found Streaming to have a mind of its own to a certain extent, but on all the articles it refers to memory usage, which I think is relatively unaffected by quality level / graphics setting.
I don’t think StreamingEnabled is necessarily an instant fix for render lag due to it being tied to memory instead of frames per second or anything else, as you can lag for many reasons before running out of memory - I think the main benefit of StreamingEnabled is for low RAM devices like mobiles and tablets.
It’s worth a bit of experimentation with the two radius values though to see how it affects your laptop/desktop players. They were added around the end of 2019: Big Changes to StreamingEnabled